


The Right Sort

by Sixthlight



Category: Rivers of London - Ben Aaronovitch
Genre: Alternate Universe, Alternate Universe - Role Reversal, Gen, Queer Character, implied Lesley May/Beverley Brook
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-06-05
Updated: 2015-06-05
Packaged: 2018-04-03 01:20:42
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 15,111
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4081042
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Sixthlight/pseuds/Sixthlight
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>DCI Peter Grant, the last official wizard in Britain, gets permission to take on an apprentice: probationary constable Thomas Nightingale. DCI May has her doubts.</p>
            </blockquote>





	The Right Sort

**Author's Note:**

  * For [leupagus](https://archiveofourown.org/users/leupagus/gifts).



> Last week leupagus suggested that given Peter and Nightingale's canonical tendency to switch student-and-teacher roles as necessary for their job, it would be interesting to see an AU where Peter was the accidentally immortal DCI and Nightingale was the probie constable who saw a ghost. I thought that sounded amazing, and that it would be even better if we also had grumpy senior DCI Lesley May heading the Belgravia Murder Team with her terrifying DS Guleed, while Nightingale hung out with fellow probationers Alex Seawoll and Miriam Stephanopoulos, and senior River Beverley Brook tried to keep an eye on her politically-minded younger sister Tyburn. And so on. It sort of...expanded from there. 
> 
> Huge thanks to maple-clef for a very speedy and helpful beta read! She Britpicks AND she fixes my continuity (and a bunch of other stuff), it's amazing. 
> 
> Also contains, apart from what's in the tags: minor crushing on DCI Grant by PC Nightingale, ace!Lady Ty, a tiny bit of past Nightingale/Seawoll.

"But what about the agreement?" Lesley wanted to know.

"It's an agreement, Lesley, it's not carved in bloody stone." I took a sip of my pint. "I'm taking him round to see the Commissioner tomorrow."

Lesley sighed. We were in the AB local. I remembered when the Belgravia lot had favoured another pub entirely, but it'd been bombed out in the war and somehow they'd never found their way back. Pity. It'd been a lovely Georgian building.

"I'm just saying," she went on like I'd never spoken, "he's not Alex or Miriam but he's bright enough, he doesn't back-talk, and he could probably do whatever he wanted. And you're whisking him off to your lair."

"Thank you, you could make that sound a _little_ more inappropriate."

"Why do you even _need_ an apprentice? You've gone without one for, what is it, seventy years?"

"Close enough. It wasn't for lack of trying, though - if you hadn't been so set on making DI before you were thirty -"

Lesley was already shaking her head. "I might not even have been able to do magic, for all you know."

"I've told you that's not how it works. It's like - it's like music. Anybody can learn it."

"My mum always said I was tone deaf."

"Well, young Nightingale isn't," I said firmly. "And that's still not how it works. Besides, who knows - if it works out, I could probably deal with two apprentices as easily as one."

She narrowed her eyes. "Hands off Alex and Miriam. I had to work to get them assigned straight to the Murder Team."

"That's quite fair." I smiled at her. "I've still got to get the Commissioner to agree to one, after all. And you stop trying to scare him off. Deal?"

She acted like she was thinking about it, taking a pull on her own pint, but I could see she was going to let it go. "Deal."

We sat in silence for a moment.

"These - face-falling-off murders," said Lesley. "They've got you worried."

"There's been nothing like it," I admitted. "Not since the war. And on top of that Mama Thames and her daughters have got some trouble stirring up with the Old Man, Beverley Brook’s even had a word to me about it."

"Enough about the river deities thing," Lesley said. She never had really believed in them, even as a wide-eyed constable - as much as Lesley had ever been a wide-eyed constable. DCI May certainly didn't. "But, alright, nothing like it since the war. Is this about the magic coming back, like you keep claiming it is?"

"Might be. Might be something new, might be something old come back. Either way - I've been around longer than I should have, and if something gets me, that's it. You'll be dealing with whatever it is without any idea of the - less natural aspects. It takes ten years to train an apprentice up. Best start sooner rather than later."

"Christ." She frowned. "You really are worried. Keep me posted, then, you hear me? I don't want to be cleaning up any of your messes without any warning. You do leave a bloody great mess when you get going. I hope your...apprentice...is a bit tidier."

"I make no promises." He'd been keen enough in the Coopertown house, going in for the tackle. He reminded me of a lot of my colleagues, young Thomas did, the men I'd known before the war who'd gone through Casterbrook and all the rest of it. I never had, of course, not with my face and my mum - I'd come to magic late, at Oxford and after, when Mellenby had taken a shine to me. But those men and boys, the ones who'd served and fought and died - Thomas Nightingale stirred up their ghosts.

And some of them had been pretty handy at making a mess, when duty called for it. "But I won't be doing all my own legwork, if he works out, and that's likely to cut down on the mess if nothing else does."

"If it's absolutely necessary," she said with some reluctance, "I can spot you Abigail. We're four corpses down already, and what I want most of all is to not make it five. Anything I can do to keep it that way...."

I'd had half an eye on Abigail Kamara as an apprentice, a year or two back, but I hadn't had the leverage with the Commissioner then to change the agreement - however brash I'd sounded when I'd told Lesley about it - not like I did now.

"In the event. I think I'll have Thomas talking with Alex and Miriam to start. I know what most of the Met thinks of me. I need him to be less..."

"Weird?" suggested Lesley. "Intimidating? Strange? A bit -"

"Distanced," I interrupted her. "Look, ever since the whole...de-aging thing...started, it's got harder and harder to keep up appropriate inter-departmental communication -"

"You know," she interrupted me in return, "I appreciate that you've adapted really well to the twenty-first century for someone who's technically Victorian -"

"I'm not sure I appreciate being defined by a monarch who died while I was still being breast-fed -"

"- but did you have to pick up the bureaucratese as well?"

"It's a language, Lesley," I said. "Latin for spells, Greek for rituals, five-syllable words where two syllables would do for the modern police hierarchy. You speak it perfectly well, you just don't like it."

"Rubbish," said Lesley. "Well, it's not a terrible plan. As your plans go."

"It's a cunning plan," I said.

"God," she said. "I can't believe I was stupid enough to tell you about Blackadder, back when."

"We all make these mistakes in our youth."

"What sort of mistakes do you think he's going to make, then?"

"Thomas Nightingale?" I shrugged. "I’ll take him to the Commissioner’s office tomorrow, and then we’ll start finding out."

*

“This is magic,” said Inspector Grant. “If you can’t do this, then nothing else really matters. But stop looking so nervous – they spent most of the nineteenth century picking people to be wizards by taking whichever spare sons of the upper classes they got. You’re at least as smart as a bunch of eleven-year-olds. Or you’d better be.”

Thomas wanted to ask how they’d picked wizards in the twentieth century, but this didn’t seem the time.

“Now,” said Grant, holding out a hand in front of him. “ _Lux_.”

The sphere of light that appeared in his hand was a pale straw-yellow. It cast light across the worn wooden benchtop, the water in the sink, turned the skin on Grant’s hand from oak to golden brown. It was…magic.

“Lux,” said Thomas. “Latin?”

“Right.” Grant closed his hand; the light vanished. “You studied languages, didn’t you? How much Latin have you got?”

“It was modern languages, at university,” Thomas told him apologetically. “I haven’t touched Latin since I left…school. But I took my A-level.”

“Good. One less thing to teach you. Although Latin’s just the start of it. But that’s not what you need to worry about right now. I’m going to make a werelight again, and I want you to pay attention to what it _feels_ like. Like when you sensed for _vestigia_ , the other day.”

Thomas wasn’t certain where this was going, but Grant seemed to have a goal in mind. “Yes, sir.”

He thought he felt it this time – a _something_ in the back of his head, like the moment when you went to kick the ball and you knew where it was going to go before it got there, the shape of its path clear in your head, your whole body moving to make it real. But when it was his turn to try, the ball spiralled all awry, the shape didn’t stay. Grant said that was perfectly normal.

“It took me a month to get it, when I started, and I was about your age. The only thing that’s going to get you there is practice. No more than four hours a day, not that you’ll have time for much more since you’re going to be picking up my legwork as well.”

“Then I suppose I should get started,” Thomas said. He wondered what the _four hours_ was about, but -

“And the reason _why_ it’s no more than four hours a day,” Grant went on pointedly, “is that the main risk of magic is shrivelling your brain – remember Coopertown’s autopsy? – and the only way to find out if you’re doing that is to get an MRI, which you’re going to be doing regularly if you stay here, or when you drop dead of a stroke.”

“Oh,” said Thomas, and, “then I won’t try sneaking extra practice in.”

“Good,” said Grant. “Because you’ll be hearing about it if you do. And listen – if you’ve got questions, just go ahead and ask them, alright? I’m not promising answers to everything, but this is going to go a lot quicker if you tell me what you’re not understanding, or if I’m leaving out anything obvious.”

“There aren’t any stupid questions, sir?”

Grant smiled. “Oh, there are plenty, but I’d much rather you asked a stupid question than didn’t ask an important one because you didn’t want to look stupid.”

Thomas wasn’t sure he liked that. He’d found, over the years, that you got a lot further by keeping your mouth shut and letting people think you knew what was going on than by admitting you didn’t have a clue – it usually gave you time to _get_ a clue. But there was a light in Grant’s eye that suggested that wasn’t going to fly here. Grant was sharp, and he might get distracted, but when his attention was on you, it was _on_. It made Thomas feel almost naked.

But Grant was _also_ his new senior officer, and Thomas was beginning to think that for the first time in a long time, there was something here he _wanted_. Not something he was moving away from, or along with because it was easy; something he wanted to move towards. Magic.

“Yes, sir,” he said. “I’ll try and keep that in mind.”

*

“Why haven’t you introduced me?” asked Beverley. “You sent him round to Mum’s and all. Does that mean you’re keeping him?”

“Seems like it,” I said. The goblin market was _literally_ underground this week, in the old tunnels of the long-closed City Road tube station; it was lit by floodlights. I found it a bit claustrophobic, frankly, but maybe they’d been short on options this time. I’d never really found out who decided where the market was going to be, and nobody would tell me if I asked, either. Part of the price for being the authorities, and all that. I’d hoped an apprentice might get around some of that, but significant portions of the demi-monde were proving all but allergic to Thomas. Not his fault, or not anything he’d _done_ , exactly. Just who he was. He minded me of my long-dead colleagues – well, he minded other people of them, too, and they hadn’t been popular for a lot of excellent reasons. A lot of them hadn’t been very popular with _me_ , if I was honest, and vice versa. “He’s good at magic. I mean, he’s _really_ good. Does what he’s told. Doesn’t mess with the _formae_.”

“Oh, Peter,” Beverley said. “I hope you don’t sound that disappointed when you’re talking to him. You’ll give the poor kid a complex.”

“You haven’t even met him. He’s not the type to get complexes. And what do you mean, I sound disappointed?”

“You wanted someone who asked questions,” she said. “Someone like Abigail Kamara – why didn’t you just get her in as an apprentice, anyway?”

“I tried,” I told her. “Before the Punch murders, the Commissioner wasn’t having it. Not enough reason to break the agreement, he said. And I’ve never had that much luck getting the Met to listen to me at the best of times. Thomas – if he wasn’t who he was, I don’t think I’d have gotten permission to take him on at all. I think the Commissioner thought he’d be a bit more…tractable. Reliable. I work with what I’ve got.”

Beverley made a face. “Bastards.”

“I work with what I’ve got,” I said again. “Job needs doing, so I find out how to get it done. I’ve had enough practice.”

“Yeah, but…” She looked at me, a slight furrow in her perfect brow. The first time I’d met Beverley Brook she’d been five and I’d felt impossibly old. It had been the sixties, the world had been changing around me faster than I’d thought possible, and I’d still been aging the way I should have.  In another ten years or so she’d be as old as I had been then, and you wouldn’t be able to tell by looking at either of us. Magic was _strange_ , some days.  “Do you even like him?”

“I didn’t get an apprentice to _like_ him.”

“Peter,” Beverley said warningly.

I thought about her question. Thomas Nightingale, his comfortable silences at breakfast, the way he’d jumped up and all but stammered the first time I’d found him watching rugby in the coach house, his perfect concentration when he was shown a new _forma_ , the way he’d squared his shoulders when I’d gone into that club in Soho and told him what to do if I didn’t come out, how relaxed he’d looked when I’d seen him drinking at the AB local with Lesley’s new constables – the ones he’d been on probation with, Alex Seawoll and Miriam Stephanopoulos.  

“Yes,” I said. “I like him. He’s…what I needed, I think. In an apprentice. He doesn’t get distracted.”

“That was what you said about that other one you wanted, back when,” Beverley recalled. “Your DCI May. You practically _sulked_ when she said no.”

“I did not sulk. I experienced very natural disappointment. She’s one of the best coppers I’ve ever met, she would’ve been a bloody _amazing_ wizard. But it helps, having her running the Murder Team. She knows when she needs to call me – us – in.”

“How come I’ve never met her, either?”

“She doesn’t really believe in you,” I said. “At least I think that’s how it goes. Nothing to stop you introducing yourself.”

“I have better things to do than deal with sceptical police officers who aren’t even on my side of the Thames,” Beverley said. “But this apprentice, that’s another thing. When do I get introduced?”

“I don’t know,” I said. “I haven’t sent him to the market yet, hasn’t been any reason for it. How about I do that when it’s in your part of the city? You can introduce yourself. Or you can just pop round the Folly for tea, you know you’re welcome any time. Molly would be thrilled.”

“Not with those wards, I’m not,” said Beverley, a bit grumpily; I couldn’t do anything to the Folly’s protections by myself and I wouldn’t if I could, because they were necessary, but I did wish they were a _bit_ more discriminating, or Beverley was a bit less wary of them. The more community-oriented policing strategy I’d had to adopt after the war hadn’t been anticipated by the people I’d inherited responsibility for the Folly from. They hadn’t really believed in gods, either, any more than Lesley did. Oh, in their existence, sure. But not in giving them an inch of leeway.

“I’ve seen your sister in the coach house,” I pointed out. “Tyburn. She and Thomas seem to be getting on.”

“Oh, I know,” Beverley said. “I’m glad _somebody_ is. Ty’s a bit difficult, lately. I think she’s just started to figure out how difficult the whole politics thing is for her. She can’t just put the glamour on everybody, because then _you’d_ come stomping in, even more than Mum would, and otherwise…well. But that’s the pie she’s got her fingers in, same as Fleet and the media.”

“What does she want, do you think?”

“What sort of question is that?”

“We can do another three rounds of rhetorical questions, or you can just tell me.”

“What any of my sisters want, Peter.” Beverley sounded irritated now. “To look after our rivers and our family and our patch. We’re goddesses, it’s our _job_ , same as policing is yours.”

“And Tyburn’s patch includes Westminster and Whitehall,” I said. “I get it.”

“By the way,” Beverley added. “Her and Thomas – you don’t think –“

“Not like you mean. I’m pretty sure he’s not much for the ladies, not that we’ve talked about it. Or we’re ever going to. And he doesn’t strike me as Tyburn’s type, does he you?”

“I have no idea what her type is,” Beverley said. “But probably for the best.”

“I don’t know. Might teach him some useful humility. Then again, she’s likely to manage that one way or another.”

“Come off it. I’ve never met a wizard who knew the meaning of humility.”

“Until now I’m the only wizard you ever met – everyone else had retired, by the time your mum jumped off London Bridge.”

Beverley’s eyes flickered. I knew and she knew there were other practitioners lurking around the demi-monde, but she wasn’t going to tell me about them if they wanted to stay out of my way and I wasn’t going to ask, because a refusal was likely to offend.

“But, Peter,” she said. “That’s my point exactly.”

*

“Ty’s going to be furious with me,” said Thomas. There was a peculiar buzzing in his head, as if his brain was finally catching up with what had just happened.

“It’s not Tyburn you need to be worrying about,” Grant was saying. “Do you have any idea – you could have been _killed_. You just stood up to a master of the art and – Thomas.”

For a moment there was genuine fear on Grant’s face, as he surveyed the damage to the garden; when he put a hand on Thomas’s shoulder, Thomas was half-convinced he was going to be _hugged_ , but apparently things weren’t quite that bad. Grant settled for a brief squeeze of his hand, and then pulled back before the first CO-19 officer rounded the corner of the house.

“You did well,” Grant said, more quietly. “Just – try not to do it again. And explain to me, please, what the hell you were doing here in the first place.”

“This – practitioner,” Thomas said. “I thought he might be trying to recruit Tyburn. Based on everything we’d learned. I didn’t think she was in any danger of saying _yes_ , but if wizards weren’t any danger to _genii locorum_ , you wouldn’t have any pull with Mama Thames and the Old Man. And I remember what happened to Ash. He nearly died. So I came to warn her, and…I didn’t think he’d be here. I really didn’t. I wouldn’t have walked into that by myself.”

“No, you’ve a bit more sense than that,” Grant allowed. “But since you did, you’d better tell me what you learned about him.”

Thomas pressed his fingers to his temples, tried to process. “Well, it’s a _him_ , certainly, and we couldn’t be sure of that before now. He dressed well. Posh accent. His face – I couldn’t make it out, he was wearing some sort of mask even once the spell wore off a little. And he….”

“What?”

“Two things,” Thomas said, stalling for time; he had to say both of them and he didn’t want to see the look on Grant’s face when he did. He focused on the movement behind Grant, the other police officers. “First – he tried to recruit _me_. There was a whole speech. I think he thought it was very persuasive. Did you know you’re a relic of the previous century who doesn’t understand the modern world?”

“It’s an opinion I’ve heard advanced on occasion,” Grant said, with a flicker of a smile. “By people who I haven’t had to teach to program the TV remote -”

“I just hadn’t _had_ to before,” Thomas said, trying not to sound too much like it was an excuse; Grant didn’t know _everything_ but sometimes it felt a bit ridiculous that he got to explain quotes from the _Aeneid_ to someone ninety years his senior, while Grant knew more than he did about modern technology. Or some parts of it, anyway; for instance, he didn’t understand Facebook at _all_. “But it was very – he missed his mark. Which is when it got, um. Messy.”

“Right,” said Grant. “And the other thing?”

“I think I recognised his voice,” Thomas said, and Grant tensed.

“Then why didn’t -”

“I don’t know from _where_ ,” and he didn’t mean to interrupt but he had to explain this properly, “I just – it sounded familiar. It could have been anywhere. Up at Oxford, somebody’s older brother, at a party, I don’t _know_ , I just know I’d heard it before. And he – he recognised me, I think, some of the things he said, he knew who I was.”

“Well,” said Grant, quite calmly. “Then the first thing we’re going to need to do is have you go through that list again – the one we had Magdalen email us – and mark off every name you know, every name you think you _might_ know, every person you could have come into contact with. It’ll narrow it down.”

“I can start as soon as we get back to the Folly,” Thomas said immediately.

“Start tomorrow. You’ll be fresher.” Grant paused. “And that’s all?”

“That’s everything I can think of right now,” said Thomas, and Grant’s expression didn’t change, but Thomas had the very strong impression that he knew what Thomas hadn’t said. What Thomas wasn’t going to say, unless Grant asked directly.

Because it hadn’t just been the thing about how long Grant had been doing this, the last official wizard in Britain – it had been all the rest, how great the Folly had been once, the things it had achieved; how Grant didn’t really represent what it had been, didn’t understand the _tradition_ of English magic, was too quick to hand over power to people who wizards should be there to control. A lot of pretty words and Thomas knew exactly what all of them meant, and he’d rather walk back into another confrontation with this faceless man, whoever he turned out to be, than repeat them to Grant.

“I’m curious, though,” Grant said. “Did he or did he not use the phrase ‘not the right sort of person’?”

“Er,” said Thomas. “It was ‘not the right type’.”

“Hm.” Grant snorted. “About what I thought.”

“He didn’t know what he was talking about,” Thomas blurted out, and then wished he hadn’t when Grant turned an appraising eye on him.

“Thank-you for the vote of confidence, Thomas.”

“I mean – really,” Thomas pressed on, because the only way out was through, and he could feel his ears heating anyway. “He doesn’t know a damn thing.”

“Except about magic, apparently,” but at least Grant sounded amused, now. “All right. Let’s see how long it’s going to take to clear this up and get home.”

*

“Where is this place, exactly?” Thomas asked, as we stepped through the gate. There’d been some clever spell, David had told me, that had been passed along from student to student once they reached the sixth form. But I’d never been to Casterbrook, and by the time the military let the place go in the fifties there wasn’t anybody to teach it to me – at least not anybody I wanted to bother with it. So now there was just a prosaic padlock, with a key.

“It’s a school,” I said. “Or it was. For prospective wizards.”

“Hogwarts, really?” Thomas grinned, for a second.

“Well, close enough. Hogwarts if it was crossed with Eton. It was called Casterbrook, though. That was the most traditional way to join the Folly – you got packed off here when you were eleven or so, and then you finished up your apprenticeship on the job, once you were out.”

“But you didn’t go here?” Thomas’s voice rose uncertainly, as if he thought it was impolite to imply I hadn’t, but knew perfectly well how unlikely it was.

I gave him a look, and he shrugged. “Well – you might have. I didn’t want to assume anything.”

“I wouldn’t call it assuming,” I said. “But no. This wasn’t the only school, mind you. There was another one up in Lancashire, the Scots and the Northerners went there, mostly. And then there were all the people who came to it later – like me.”

“How _did_ you become a wizard, then?”

“Chap I met at Oxford.” We stepped into the building, and had to cast werelights to see; all the curtains were closed, and most of the sockets didn’t even have lightbulbs. Just what the cleaners needed. “Name of David Mellenby. He was a wizard, and a researcher, and – long story short, he taught me. We worked together for quite a while, until...until he died. In the war.”

If he’d only got on the damn glider - but there wasn’t any point going over that argument. It had been rendered moot by German gunfire nearly seventy years ago. 

“You…weren’t a policeman? Before…”

“Before the war? No.”

Thomas hesitated, and then said, “Did you want to be one?”

“It didn’t make much difference,” I said. “There wasn’t anybody else left.”

“Oh,” said Thomas. “Is that why – all those names. In the lobby.”

“I’m surprised you’ve never asked about them.”

“There didn’t seem much to ask,” he said. “It’s a war memorial. Although – I’d never heard of a battle of Ettersberg. But history never was my strong suit.”

“They used to be here,” I said as we stepped into the hall. “But the place was closed up, and it didn’t – there wasn’t any point. If they weren’t going to be remembered. Come on – library’s up the left-hand staircase.”

What I didn’t mention was that I never used the lobby, or almost never, so I hadn’t had to look at them. It had been a compromise of sorts. In preparation for selling the school, actually, but even though I technically had the authority it wasn’t a simple transaction even if I’d found a buyer, and I’d just never got around to it. 

On the way out, breathing only a little heavily with the weight of the bags he was carrying – good thing I had an apprentice for that sort of thing, after getting myself shot _again_ , like the colossal idiot I’d been – Thomas asked what had happened to all the wizards who hadn’t died at Ettersberg.

“Retired,” I said. “A lot of them were wounded, one way or another. Almost all of them gave up magic. And then…it was just me.”

Thomas didn’t say anything.

“You’re wondering,” I said. “What we were doing there, what was worth so many of us dying for. Or at least what idiocy got us wiped out like that.”

“Uh,” said Thomas. “Yes?”

“I’ll tell you.” I took a deep breath; I needed it. “You need to know about it at some point. But – not today. Just…not today.”

*

“Did I hear right Guleed made DI?” was the first thing Thomas asked Alex and Miriam when he met them at the pub. They were all still in their work clothes; Miriam always looked a lot better in suits than Alex did, a strictly aesthetic judgement on Thomas’ part.

“There you are, Tom. And you did,” said Miriam.

The Tom thing had started at Hendon, and Thomas had found it easier to let it go on, everything considered.

“About time,” Alex growled. “She knows what she’s about.”

“You won’t be getting any argument from me,” said Thomas.

“Before I forget,” Miriam said. “Pride’s the Wednesday after next. I’m expecting you two there. Uniforms. I know we’re all plainclothes but it looks better if we do uniforms.”

“I’m still not bloody queer, you know,” said Alex, and when Thomas and Miriam both glared at him, “but fine, since you’ll be on my back if I don’t.”

Thomas wasn’t quite convinced on that point, principally after their end-of-probation party when a very drunk Alex had kissed him and announced he’d ‘just been checking’, but Alex had never mentioned that incident again and you couldn’t have paid Thomas to bring it up.

“I…should probably check with my governor,” said Thomas. “Just in case.”

“Why?” Miriam asked.

“I…there’s only the two of us,” Thomas said. “I’m not saying I _won’t_ , I’m saying it’s not fair to turn up without telling him first.”

“He can’t make you _not_ go, unless there’s a case or something,” said Alex, surprisingly. “We’re allowed off for it.”

“I know.” Thomas wouldn’t be going of his own accord, truth be known, but Miriam was rather insistent and it seemed like cowardice to avoid it. But he really did hope Grant wouldn’t disapprove. He didn’t seem the type, but – you could never know. Not until the moment came to it, and sometimes not until afterwards. Grant’s good opinion was important to him, and having a good opinion of Grant was important to him, and it would be quite easy to let him think it was all Miriam, especially with Alex’s six feet five of avowed heterosexuality dragged along. Much less awkward, too. And yet. “I’ll do it first thing.”

He was saved from further discussion on the topic by Tyburn showing up; he’d texted and said he was having drinks with friends near her work, but he hadn’t been sure whether she’d come. They had a tentative friendship built largely on shared musical opinions and, Thomas was reasonably certain, Ty using him as socialisation practice for her assault on the political classes. He didn’t actually mind that much. She was good company, when she was in the right mood.

Thomas would have introduced her by her official first name, because he knew it was what she used around people who didn’t know about the Rivers, but she pre-empted him by saying they could call her Ty; an unusual amount of friendliness, and Thomas could practically see Alex and Miriam relaxing as they shook her hand. The glamour was a fascinating thing to watch, when it wasn’t directed at you. Fascinating and a little worrying.

“So how do you know Tom?” Alex asked, looking Ty up and down.

“Her mother does a lot of community organising,” Thomas said before Ty could say much. “With the, um, community we liaise with.”

Miriam frowned, but she didn’t get a chance to ask the question she obviously wanted to, because Ty just said “I’m the goddess of the River Tyburn,” and waved a negligent hand in the direction of the bartender. “A glass of the Marlborough sauvignon blanc, please.”

She got it about thirty seconds later; in this pub, that qualified as an _actual_ miracle, which was probably why Alex and Miriam weren’t laughing their heads off at her casual declaration. That and Ty being…Ty.

“Know a lot of goddesses, do you Tom?” Miriam said.

“Not really,” Thomas demurred. “Four, or five, or – how many sisters _do_ you have, Ty?”

“More than enough,” she said, sipping at her wine.

“Ri-ight,” said Miriam, but she didn’t scoff and that was good enough. Alex looked suspicious, but Alex was suspicious of everything and everyone up to and including himself. It was why he was definitely going to make inspector at least, and why he probably wouldn’t get to superintendent. Once you hit bureaucracy you had to be able to fake agreement. Not that Thomas had ever been particularly good at that, either.

“You said you worked with them,” Ty added to Thomas, frowning, “but they’re not wizards.”

“Miriam and Alex work for DCI May,” Thomas explained. “We liaise on…things.”

“Dead people, mostly,” Alex said. “We do the murder, Tom and his boss worry about the weird bollocks.”

“Who calls it that?” Ty wanted to know, clearly torn between disdain and amusement. She’d shot Thomas a look at the _Tom_ , too, cataloguing it for later. Ty catalogued everything for later. She was as bad as Grant.

“DCI May,” said Miriam. “Though she calls it weird shit, more often. How would you know we weren’t…we’re not part of the SAU, anyway? Is there a special glow, or something?”

“Or something,” said Ty. “More like a smell.”

Alex found this uproariously funny, of course; Thomas glared at Ty, but she just shrugged.

“Wait, though,” he found himself saying. “When did that start? I haven’t been working for Grant very long.”

“I don’t know. Not the first time I met you. Certainly the second. So…a few weeks? A month or two? I don’t know why you care, really.”

“It’s important to know these things,” Miriam said. “In case he ever needs someone to _not_ know he’s a...an apprentice. Wizard. Whatever.”

Thomas hadn’t even thought of that; as far as he knew the only people who could smell magic on him were Ty and her sisters, and presumably Father Thames and his sons. They all knew who he was anyway.

“Wizards.” Alex said it like a swearword – then again, Alex used swearwords as punctuation, so that didn’t mean too much. “Bloody hell. Like we don’t have enough problems.”

“It’s been here all along,” Thomas said. “The Folly. Grant. Ty and her mum and –“

“Not me personally,” Ty said quickly. “Or Mum, even. Just ask the Thames boys, they’ll tell you that we’re mere _parvenus_.”

“Is that really how they say it?”

“Doesn’t matter really,” said Miriam. “If it was all here all along, then we keep doing our jobs the same way we have been. Not ours to deal with, either, seeing as we’re mere constables.”

“Speaking of constables,” added Alex, “did I hear right that Abigail’s buggering off to join your lot?”

“You heard right,” said Thomas. “She’s supposed to go see the Commissioner and take the oath next week.”

“You’re expanding.” Ty’s tone was thoughtful, but her eyes were hard. Thomas liked her, but she wasn’t an _easy_ person. 

Miriam was philosophical. “Good. I like her, but there’s a lot of us and only two of you, and if we’re going to keep having all these…things…you might as well have her full-time. Honestly, I’m surprised she didn’t go straight out of probation.”

“It wasn’t all going to shit like it is now then, was it?” said Alex. “So no need for it.”

“We’ve cleared up at _least_ a couple of cases, it’s not as bad as all that,” argued Thomas. This won him no points with either Alex or Miriam, but Ty caught his eye; she knew that at least half of what they did wasn’t about clear-up rates or even what you could technically call illegal behaviour. Maybe more than half.

“You’re not even _on_ the org chart, except by courtesy, you know,” was Alex’s parting shot as he headed in search of the bartender. Thomas wasn’t sure if he was more surprised by that fact or that Alex had been paying attention to the Met’s org chart. Now Thomas thought about it, Alex was right, but it wasn’t something he’d paid a great deal of attention to.

“I’m going to the ladies,” Miriam said, getting up, “and please try and get off org charts by the time I’m back; we’re off work.”

“You need to make something that _works_ ,” Ty said, leaning forward on her elbows. “It’s all held together by string and sealing-wax and Grant making nice with everybody and carrying a big stick behind his back. You could practically feel the whole thing wobbling, when he got shot. Anybody could have stepped in. You, Thomas – don’t take this the wrong way, but you couldn’t pull it off right now, if something happened to him, no matter what sort of magical _wunderkind_ he thinks you are.”

Thomas snorted. “He doesn’t think _that_ highly of me. He’s always complaining about how I don’t think of the implications.”

“Mmmm,” said Ty, and sipped her wine. “Regardless. You don’t have a system right now, you have people. That’s the whole point of civilisation, systems that outlast people.”

“That’s a bit rich, given your family.”

“I’m not the first Tyburn,” she said. “We come and we go, too. The rivers endure.”

“I’ve got enough on my plate right now, Ty,” Thomas said. “Studying, and even with Abigail we’ve got enough casework to keep us all busy, and whatever this Faceless Man wants – and if I wanted to get involved with _systems_ , I wouldn’t have joined the Met.”

“No, you’d be working for some MP,” Ty observed. “You _could_ have, you know.”

“I know,” said Thomas, who’d rather have moved to Australia. “Look – if you really feel that strongly about it, why don’t you suggest it to Grant? It sounds like the sort of thing he’d want to hear.”

“Do you think?” For just a moment, Ty sounded almost vulnerable. “He’ll brush me off. If he wanted it to work more efficiently, he’d have made it happen. He’s had seventy years.”

But he hadn’t, Thomas was pretty sure; he’d had time to notice, now, how Grant slipped through the cracks, the way he had to work to be heard when he was dealing with new people. He’d noticed, too, how Grant deployed him _at_ people in a very strategic way. He thought that maybe Grant had had to struggle to keep the Folly in existence at all.

“You should talk to him,” he said again. “About whatever ideas you have, about whatever you think needs fixing – about what you think the Folly should be. He’ll hear you out. He listens to me, even when he doesn’t have to.”

“Well.” Ty frowned. “Maybe I will.”

“You two sound like you’re plotting bloody world domination,” said Alex, making his return.

“Just London,” said Ty. “I have very modest goals.”

“As long as nobody tells May,” Alex said. “Sounds like the kind of thing that’d drive her bonkers. And she’s bad enough right now, with Abigail fucking off.”

*

“I still can’t believe you stole Abigail,” Lesley grumped at me. “You utter _bastard_.”

“And hello to you too, Inspector May.”

“Sahra’s just got her promotion, you know,” she went on. “So she’ll be running her own shouts, which is all well and good and with mad magicians running around we’re going to need it, but I spend all this time training Abigail up the way I like her and now you’ve gone and kidnapped her.”

“You know,” I said, “I don’t actually _kidnap_ or _lure_ or do anything untoward to people. I make them a perfectly normal offer of transfer to my unit, and they accept.”

“But you could.” Apparently Lesley was serious about this particular grievance. “I’ve heard you talk about it – this…seducing thing.”

“Yeah,” I said, sitting down on the nearest bench. It let Lesley loom over me, as much as she was capable of looming. I thought it might make her feel better. “Yeah. If you want to be that serious about it. And it’s _seducere_ , not seducing. I _could_. What offends me, actually, is the idea you think I _would_.”

“Look, I don’t. Abigail would’ve been in your unit before you could say _abracadabra_ if you’d been able to get permission for it when she was finishing her probation, and I wasn’t that attached to Tom. But…”

“That’s what worries you about magic,” I finished.

“It’s too much,” Lesley said. “Too much power for one person. Look at how much trouble your faceless magician is giving us. How many bodies so far? And you’ve not even got a proper suspect list. You’re alright, but every extra person – it’s another one who might…”

“Go to the dark side? You really need to stop getting your ideas about magic from popular fiction. Still not how it works.”

“Then what do you call it?”

“They’re criminals,” I said. “Just like any other criminals. As for the body count – we live in a world with bloody nuclear weapons and you’re waving your hands over magic. Any terrorist with a mind to it could do worse.”

Lesley didn’t like magic because she didn’t understand it, and more to the point she didn’t want to – it interfered with her nice clean worldview of people who broke laws, and Lesley, whose job it was to arrest them and send them to trial.

“What are you even doing here?” she asked. We were on the bank of the Thames, and that question applied to her more than me; I was there because I needed to talk to Beverley. Maybe there was a case Lesley was having trouble with – I wasn’t sure what she had on her desk right now, but I knew sometimes she’d walk her thoughts out.

“Community outreach,” I said. “With a river deity you don’t believe in.”

Lesley surveyed the Thames, dark and placid in the drizzle. “Really? Where?”

“She’s late,” I said. I’d called her, but she’d been about to go on patrol and had offered to chat with me after.

Naturally, that was exactly the moment at which Beverley emerged from the river. She just walked up out of the water in her neoprene wetsuit. I’d seen her and her sisters do much the same a dozen times or more over the years. Lesley actually twitched. The last time I’d seen Lesley visibly react like that she’d still been a sergeant, so it counted for something.

“You didn’t mention there’d be company,” Beverley said to me.

“Wasn’t expecting there to be,” I said.  “DCI Lesley May, at Belgravia. Lesley, this is Beverley Brook, goddess of a small river in south London. We’ve got some stuff you don’t want to know about to discuss.”

Lesley had already given Beverley the professional police once-over, but I caught Beverley giving her an equally measuring look.

“Pleasure,” she said, offering Lesley her hand.

“…likewise,” said Lesley, after only a brief pause. She didn’t dry her hand off on her coat, either, even though Beverley was dripping wet. “Isn’t it a bit chilly for a swim?”

“Never in my mum’s river,” said Beverley. “And that’s what the wetsuit’s for.” She extracted her phone from a zipped pocket. “I’m late, I know. Someone fell off Waterloo Bridge.”

“And you what, dived in to fish them out?” Lesley wanted to know.

“Oh, I was already in the water.”

“But…you fished them out?”

“Not really my job.” Beverley smiled at her. “I need to talk to Peter now, do you mind?”

“Beverley,” I said reprovingly, but Lesley half-turned to go before her better sense kicked in.

“Hey!” she said indignantly. “Whatever you’re doing, stop it.”

“Come on, Bev, not my colleagues.”

Beverley sighed. “We really do need to be quick, Mum’ll want to see me.”

“You didn’t answer the question about fishing them out,” said Lesley, folding her arms. “And you just tried to magic me into going away. Which is probably illegal.”

“Only if it disturbs the peace,” I said. “To be technical.”

“I’m a police officer, therefore it counts as disturbing the peace,” said Lesley, who had learned her coppering in the eighties in many important and ingrained ways that would concern me more if I wasn’t convinced of her basic goodness as a human being. Which wasn’t to say I was _un_ concerned. “At the least I’d like an apology.”

“Fair point.” Bev cocked her head. “Will you accept being bought a drink? And a longer explanation where your very senior colleague’s not around to get technical about it?”

Lesley narrowed her eyes, and to my utter surprise thirty seconds later they’d exchanged phone numbers and Lesley had strode off to finish walking out whatever her problem was.

“Please tell me that was magic too,” I said.

“Not in the slightest,” Beverley said, putting her phone away. “I only ever hear your side of things, about the police work. And I bet she only gets your side of things about everything else. This is going to be _fascinating_.”

Beverley had always been a bit keen on the crime-solving part of my job, at least enough to be occasionally helpful beyond any agreements or arrangements. But this was still new.

“It’s just -”

“Do you seriously think we’ll have nothing better to do than talk about you?”

“I was brought up not to speculate on ladies’ private conversations,” I said, which was very barely true because I’d grown up in the East End and ladies had been pretty thin on the ground in my life until I’d gone to Oxford. But it made Beverley roll her eyes, which was the point. “Now – about this car crash.”

“I can’t say for _sure_ it’s your business,” she said, “but I can’t say for sure it’s not.”

*

Thomas was wringing out his shirt into one of Molly’s herb pots – it was nothing but rainwater, it wouldn’t do any harm – when Abigail appeared in the back door, smirking.

“Let me guess,” she said. “You said something about wanting to see some _real_ magic.”

“Not exactly,” said Thomas. It was a warm day and the sun was high enough in the sky that it penetrated the courtyard between the Folly proper and the coach house; he was hoping it would dry him off enough that he wouldn’t drip all the way back to his room and a change of clothes and towel-down. He could have just made a break for it once the raincloud had finally dissipated, but he didn’t like to think what Molly’s opinion would be if he’d got water all through the place like that. She was a little strange and occasionally scary, but Thomas did value her good opinion. And she’d listened, his first few weeks here, when he’d sat in the kitchen late at night and wondered out loud exactly what he was _doing_. Her contributions to the conversation hadn’t been verbal, of course, but they had been there. All things considered, he didn’t want to upset Molly.

“What did you say, then?” asked Abigail, leaning against the door frame.

“We were talking about adjectival _formae_ , and I asked what kind of spell needed eight or nine _formae_. And…”

Grant had looked at Thomas, and said “You want a practical example?”, and Thomas had known something was up by the gleam in his eye, but he’d been curious, too, and – he wasn’t saying it was _worth_ it, but somehow the broad grin on Grant’s face when he spoke the spell had made the whole thing not as annoying as it might have been. There was something infectious about the way Grant clearly loved magic, a joyful excitement that seeped in around the edges when he demonstrated a new _forma_ or got to talking about some aspect of magical theory. He clearly expected Thomas to share in it, and – Thomas did.

“Right,” said Abigail, “and then you got your own personal raincloud for twenty minutes. Happened to me when I was eight. I shrieked a lot. Bet you did better than that.”

“I probably would’ve shrieked, if I was eight,” Thomas was happy to admit. “I didn’t know you’d known him that long.”

“He’s family,” Abigail said. “Don’t ask me how exactly. I think his mum was my dad’s aunt, or great-aunt, or something like that. I’ve known him forever. It was one of the reasons I thought about the police, when I left school.”

“Oh,” said Thomas. “I guess I thought – since he’s so old, really – he must have stopped talking to his family, or…didn’t people notice when he started getting younger?”

“They must’ve,” said Abigail, “but it wasn’t something we talked about, you know; Uncle Peter was a wizard, everybody knew that. It was just…how it was.”

Thomas couldn’t imagine having a wizard for an uncle and that just being how it was; but until he’d seen a ghost in Covent Garden he’d never imagined magic could be real. He hadn’t been very good at science at school but he knew how it worked, and there hadn’t seemed to be any room for ghosts or wizards or whatever in the real world. Which only showed how wrong you could be.

“Does he – I mean – did he ever have a family?”

“You mean like a wife and kids? He was married, when he was younger. I think she died in the war, or – a long time ago. They didn’t have kids, I’d have heard about that. Why do you want to know, anyway?”

“He talks a lot,” Thomas said, “but even when he talks about himself, he’s not really talking about himself. He just makes you think he has.” He took a step backwards, to follow the shifting patches of sunlight; water wasn’t running off him in rivulets any more, but he wasn’t feeling much drier.

“Pot, kettle,” said Abigail. “You never talk about your family at _all_. Do you even have brothers or sisters or anything?”

“Hordes. Two brothers, two sisters, they’re all older. We just don’t – I went away to school, and so did they, so they weren’t around very much when I was little. There’s not so much to talk about.”

He had less and less in common with his family now – it had started when he’d joined the Met, but now…he didn’t even want to imagine what they’d say, his parents especially; they’d probably decide he was having a mental breakdown.

“Oh, well, brothers,” said Abigail. “I know all about them. Especially older ones. Do they know about…”

“Yes, I mean – I’m out, if that’s what you’re asking.”

Abigail blinked. “I meant about _magic_. But good for you.”

“Magic? No. Too hard to explain.”

She nodded, but didn’t say anything else. Grant appeared in the doorway behind her; she started, and so did Thomas, who wondered how much he’d – but they hadn’t been gossiping exactly.

“Thought it might have stopped by now,” Grant said cheerfully, throwing something past Abigail with a gentle underhand; Thomas caught it reflexively, then realised it was a towel. “I’ve got the timing down to about twenty-five minutes exactly.”

Thomas immediately set about drying his hair and face. “Abigail was telling me you like to throw this one at people.”

“It gets the point across pretty neatly,” said Grant. “And somehow it hasn’t stopped being funny yet.”

“For you,” said Abigail pointedly.

“I saw you laughing.” 

“How long until I can learn it?” Thomas asked.

“About another five or six years.” Grant looked at both of them. “At which point I’ll be sure to start carrying an umbrella.”

*

“What, er,” said Thomas. “What are you doing for Christmas, sir?”

“Nothing in particular,” I told him. “I spend the morning with Molly, and it’s been a bit of a week – I could do with a quiet afternoon.”

It wasn’t that I _couldn’t_ spend Christmas with other people – I hadn’t had any siblings but I’d had about a dozen cousins, on both sides of the family, and plenty of their children and grandchildren still knew me. There were two or three family celebrations I could have got an invitation to, if I’d wanted. But, frankly, I’d been too busy this December for much family socialising. It wouldn’t be a bad thing, to have the Folly to myself – Molly aside – for an afternoon. I’d only ever stayed there for a few days at a time before the war, and those memories of it bustling with people were long overlain by all the silent years in between. I didn’t really have people over very much – either they couldn’t (like Bev and her sisters), or it would have made them uncomfortable (most of my extended family). Now I had Thomas and Abigail clattering around, and it was good – but I wouldn’t mind the quiet.

“I was just wondering if…are you sure there isn‘t any tidying up we need to do?”

“You’re not _trying_ to work on Christmas, are you, Thomas?” I asked, and regretted it as soon as he looked away; of course he was. He hadn’t talked much about his family, but I knew he’d done the whole boarding school thing, and they didn’t seem close. I knew they weren’t particularly happy with his career choice, either, from one or two things he’d said.

“Although if you’re willing,” I went on quickly, “Sergeant Kumar and I were going to investigate your theory about the Crossrail construction. There’s nothing for it but to compare all the original plans and the current ones, and that takes time. If you could get away from your Christmas dinner early, say…”

“ _Yes_ ,” he said instantly, “ah, that’s, of course I can, if you need me.”

“Good,” I said. “I’ll give you a call when we’re getting started, how about that?”

“Sure. And – thanks.”

I wondered exactly what he was trying to avoid. Then I decided it wasn’t really my business anyway. Didn’t stop me wondering.

“Not at all,” I said out loud. “Merry Christmas.”

“Merry Christmas, sir,” he said, and smiled.

*

“Do you have a _thing_ for him?” said Ty, half-distasteful and half-fascinated. They were at her house, indulging in a glass of wine and arguments about jazz, but the conversation had taken a sudden left turn.

“No,” Thomas said quickly, but it was too late and he was half a glass of wine too far to lie really well, especially to Ty. “Maybe.”

Ty wrinkled up her nose. “But why?”

“I,” said Thomas, thinking about the first time he’d seen Grant, in Covent Garden. He’d been pacing the portico of the Actors’ Church, trying to decide whether he should just pack it in, whether he’d had a hallucination brought on by lack of sleep. Then he’d turned to see Grant walking purposefully towards him. Thomas had never had much trouble finding someone if he was in a mood to get laid, which was less often than not, and he’d certainly never resorted to picking people up on the street. But for about half a minute there, before Grant had introduced himself, he’d regretted Grant wasn’t walking towards him that way in a bar. “He. Well. He’s my governor, I know, I try not to think about it, but some people you just can’t help it, you know?”

He tried not to think about it because if anything it was even more dangerous to consider now, when he _knew_ Grant, not just a first glimpse of a handsome stranger, tall and dark and all the rest of it. Aside from just being awkward.

“No,” said Ty. “I don’t, really.”

“Oh, come on,” said Thomas. “You’ve never just looked at someone and thought, I would _definitely_ do that? Whether or not it’s a good idea?”

“No,” Ty said again. “I don’t. None of it sounds very interesting. It _wasn’t_ very interesting. Not boys, not girls, not when I was drunk and not when I was sober. I had three years at uni to figure that out.”

“Oh.” Thomas thought about that, while Nina Simone’s smoky voice floated across the room. “Fair enough. Well, I do, and fine, I thought it about Grant – but I know how to keep this stuff to myself.”

She was frowning at him, and Thomas frowned back. “I _do_. I’ve got to live with him, and all the rest of it.”

“No, no.” Ty waved a hand. “I’m not doubting your self-control, don’t give me that look. I – fair enough?”

“Were you looking for commentary?”

“Not in the slightest. But usually I get it.”

Thomas shrugged. “You know what you want. Or don’t.”

She eyed him. “Does this mean you expect me to _not_ tell you off about your terrible taste?”

“Can we just not talk about it? I’d rather.”

Ty heaved a sigh. “Oh, very well. I’m not going to understand it and frankly I don’t want to.” She pursed her lips. “You _do_ know he’s about ninety years older than you.”

“It hadn’t come up,” Thomas said. “Yes, of course I know. But he’s not getting any older, or not any more than _you_ are.”

“I do wish I knew why that was,” Ty said, gazing into the middle distance. “It seems terribly convenient.”

“It’s still a mystery, as far as I know.” That was mostly true. Thomas hadn’t wanted to ask why, but Grant had been quite frank about it; he didn’t know, and while he had several theories they were either unprovable or disturbing.

“I mean, what if it’s like the vampires,” Grant had said. “I thought about that. But I haven’t noticed anybody mysteriously dying in my vicinity, and believe me, I kept a count for about a decade, of everybody I spent much time around. Statistically normal death rates. Assuming I did my maths right – you know, I should probably give Abdul the data, I think it would entertain him. Do stop looking at me like that, Thomas.”

“Sorry,” Thomas had said. “Didn’t mean to.”

“You never do,” Grant had said, more amused than exasperated. “But anyway, that’s as much as I know. For all of which I could drop dead tomorrow, although it’s not something that keeps me up at night.”

“Mmmm,” said Ty. “If you say so.”

“And why would you want to know?” Thomas felt compelled to ask.

“Might be useful.” She shook her head at him. “I know whose side you’re on, Thomas, it’s not a _threat_. Merely an observation.”

“I don’t think Grant thinks it’s a matter of sides. I don’t think I do, either.”

“But of course it is.” Ty blinked her black cat-eyes at him, amused. “That doesn’t mean there’s only two of them. Or three, or four, even.”

Thomas wondered again what he was doing here, with Ty; he supposed he’d thought vaguely that it was safe enough, with her, because she was hardly out to seduce him or the other way around – but it was occurring now that that wasn’t even the easiest way she could influence him. Yet Grant had seemed to encourage the friendship, or at least approve of it.

“Then we’ll have to hope our sides stay pointed in the same direction,” he said.

“Yes,” said Ty. “Believe me or not, but – I hope they do.”

*

“There were definitely chimeric cells,” Walid said. “Unless someone’s been keeping large cats in central London. So they haven’t been moved too far.”

“Bollocks,” I said. “But it’s old, isn’t it? Might even have been the first safe house he put them in after we found the club in October.”

“That seems likely,” Walid agreed. “So not that helpful after all.”

“No, no. It’s better than nothing. Explain to me again – is it the actual DNA that’s chimeric, or is it a mixture of cells? I’m not sure it makes a difference for police purposes, but I really want to work out _how_ he’s doing this.”  There had been those demon traps, after all. It was all a little too much like some of the things we’d found at Ettersberg. If he was trying to revive some of _those_ techniques…

“There’s references in your library, or at the Bodleian, surely?” he asked. “And it’s a mixture of cells, not the DNA. God be praised – genetic engineering by magic feels like just a step too far.”

I snorted. “I’m not sure grafting bits of big cats onto people to keep them as sex slaves is _not_ a step too far, but I take your point. And unfortunately – or fortunately, I’m not quite sure – most of the Folly references mutter about the darkest of black magic, I use their chosen terminology, but decline to give instructions.”

There was the Black Library, of course. But I’d never been able to stomach more than fragments. I didn’t want it to be necessary for me to read more. Besides – my German had never been that good to start with.

Walid grimaced. “Ach, well, I’m not sure if that’s a pity or not.”

“You know I’m not a big believer in _things man was not meant to know_ – or woman, of course – but…there are things man can live without knowing if he wants to sleep well at night, let’s put it that way.”

Abdul Haqq Walid was a very red-headed, very Scottish, and recently converted Muslim resident at UCH, who’d noticed _vestigia_ on a corpse two or three years back and been smart enough to vocalise his thoughts on it. Since then, he’d taken to the existence of magic with an enthusiasm I approved of. I’d managed to get him listed as the Folly’s official medical adviser. It was _so_ helpful to have a proper medical adviser again. I’d managed to keep some of the pre-war lot in touch for a while after the war, but the last of them had died in the eighties. I was sure I’d missed a whole lot of cases I probably should have been called in on after that, but in the decades between I hadn’t managed to find anybody who really believed me about magic. Or _vestigia_. Or the more…cryptic aspects of what I liked to call cryptopathology. (Walid said he liked that name too; since we were the only people likely to use it, apart from Abigail and Thomas, I’d decided I was sticking with it.)

“Are we talking about the club again?”

“Mostly.” I hadn’t been able to keep Walid out of there, or at least out of the forensic team’s reports, because I wasn’t his boss – and he was old enough to make his own decisions. But I sort of wished I had. At least Thomas had gone without argument. “Although it applies as a general principle. By the way – I assume the MRIs are still proving uneventful?”

“Yes and no. It’s very interesting having Thomas and Abigail both learning,” Walid said. “You’d been doing magic for however long when I first got you in the MRI, but they’re just starting out. I think it’s actually changing their brains.”

“Is it dangerous?” I asked sharply. It had been a not-uncommon event back when there’d been more wizards in Britain; every so often, someone you knew just dropped dead or had a stroke from overdoing it. I hadn’t really told Thomas how many of the casualties from Ettersberg, the survivors, fell into that category. It had been a lot of them. Staffs or no staffs. I was following the traditional training the way I’d had it, as best I could – having only two students required some innovation, so did the particular requirements of our job – but it was nearly ninety years since I’d been at their stage of study and the teaching I’d done before the war had all been with more advanced students, boys who’d already been through Casterbrook or the equivalent. I mostly trusted in Thomas’s sense of duty and Abigail’s sense of self-preservation to keep them within the restrictions I’d set, but the more actual scans of their brains we got the better.

“No, no lesions,” said Walid. “Nothing like those records you showed me, or any of the autopsies I’ve done.”

It was a while since we’d had a dedicated medical liaison for the Folly, but when St Bartholomew’s had got their first MRI in the eighties and I’d realised the implications, I’d organised to get myself checked – and some of the surviving retired practitioners. The results had been both enlightening and horrifying. Even the men who’d retired right after the war, broken their staffs and never practiced again, never had a stroke or haemorrhage, had had at least minor damage.

My brain was fine. Part of the enduring mystery.

“But you think you can detect changes.”

“Structural stuff,” Walid agreed. “They look more like your scans. If you want the details I’ll need to send you a couple of textbook chapters.”

“Email them, or just tell me which textbooks and I’ll make a trip to the library,” I said. “My reading pile isn’t _quite_ toppling off my nightstand yet.” I’d slowly updated the Folly’s library over the years, for my own personal interest because it wasn’t like there was anybody else to read the books, but there were plenty of topics it didn’t cover. Neurobiology was certainly one of them, past the basics you could get in an anatomy textbook. At least we’d had that – I’d had to walk Thomas through the details of the digestive tract last year, after that whole _vagina dentata..._ thing. I really did think they would have covered that in modern schools, but Thomas assured me they probably had.

“I just, ah, may not have been paying attention.”

“What _were_ you paying attention to?” I asked.

“Rugby,” he said. “Languages. My friends. All sorts of things, really.”

“Except basic human biology?”

“I was fourteen. I didn’t really see why it mattered.”

Of course he didn't. 

Back at the Folly after meeting with Walid – I’d dropped in on him at UCH – I went to find Thomas and Abigail, to fill them in on what I’d just learned. Abigail was in the library, working on her Latin; they hadn’t offered it at her comprehensive, so she was well behind Thomas. But determined to catch up fast. Thomas turned out to be in the firing range, practicing. We’d run through the old targets in the winter, and I’d had to scrounge a new lot from the Met firing range. 

I lurked in the back, since Thomas didn’t seem to have seen me. He was already faster than he really had a right to be with the fireball version of _lux_ – and it wasn’t careless speed, either; his aim was good as well. Part of me still wished I hadn’t felt it necessary to teach him this, him or Abigail. I didn’t like the idea that there were threats facing them that needed this sort of response. Of course there was always the hope they’d never have to use it – but it was already too late for that, wasn’t it?

I hadn’t even learned this spell – or a lot of others, the purely aggressive sort – until just before the war. We’d had the latitude to be specialists, back then, and all I’d ever really wanted was to figure out what magic _was_ , how it fitted in with the world. I hadn’t been blind to the dangers of it. David’s blithe assurance that science was more important than nation-states, that his correspondence with the Continent would survive some ‘sabre-rattling’, that was how he’d put it, had never been mine. I’d missed out on the Great War by inches and weeks, but I’d had plenty of cousins and friends who hadn’t. I knew I didn’t want to go to war, and a war with magic wouldn’t be any cleaner.

I knew why all that was coming to mind, things I didn’t normally dwell on. The apprehension was the same.

 _It’s got you worried_ , Lesley had said about the Punch murders, before we’d known that was what they were. It was why I’d pushed to take Thomas on. This was worse. It wasn’t just a matter of keeping the peace anymore, no matter how much I wanted it to be. We had an enemy, not a chaotic spirit but a determined magician, and weren’t going to be able to rest easily until he was dead or in custody, and…I hadn’t said as much to Thomas or Abigail, or anybody else for that matter, but the former was a lot more likely than the latter. I didn’t like _that_ , either.

But if we couldn’t deal with that sort of threat – then, in the end, what were we even _for_?

“Sir,” said Thomas, lowering his hand and turning to look at me. “Did you want something?”

“Didn’t know you’d spotted me,” I said. “Yes, as a matter of fact, if you’re done with practice. I just met with Abdul.”

“Are our brains shrivelling yet?” he asked, as we turned to leave.

“Not visibly,” I reassured him. “But mostly we were discussing the chimera sightings from November; he confirmed he found chimeric cells, in that flat.”

“I still can’t work out…” Thomas shook his head. “Why do something like that?”

“Because he can,” I said. “Because he wants to push the boundaries. To turn theory into practice. Or maybe just for fun, or for his own particular pleasure. But to know if he can, I think.”

“I don’t understand that.” Thomas spoke abruptly. “Not at all.”

“Really?” I said. “I do.”

“Why?”

“It’s not,” I said, “the sort of mistake you’d ever make. So I’m not sure it matters.”

Let’s be clear: it’s not the _doing_ I understood, the stuff we’d found. The turning of people into things. But the curiosity…that was very easy to understand. _What mistakes is he going to make_ , Lesley had asked. I thought I knew, now. Thomas Nightingale’s sins would be of omission, not commission.

I was personally hoping there wouldn’t be too many opportunities for either. But there were only three of us. There’d be room for something.

*

“Explain to me again,” said Grant, “how it is you were born after the invention of the personal computer and you still know even less about them than I do.”

“Just never really seen the need,” said Thomas. “I can type. And all the rest of the stuff you _need_ to do. It’s like – the difference between being able to drive a car and being able to repair one.”

The repair job at hand was the old desktop they used as a HOLMES terminal and for general use; it was crashing every time it got left on for more than ten minutes. Thomas had his own personal laptop, but Grant was reduced to answering emails on his smartphone, which he wasn’t happy about. He’d asked Thomas to take a look at it, and been taken aback when Thomas had confessed he knew next to nothing about fixing computers – whenever he had trouble with his he’d always asked a friend or taken it in to a repair place.

“You had to be able to do both, when I learned to drive.” Grant sighed. “That’s fine, I think Belgravia’s got some sort of IT staff. Find out about it and get it fixed. I’d point Abigail at it but she’s got enough on her plate. In the meantime – how are you going with the industrialisation of magic book?”

Grant hadn’t been joking about languages and magic; there was an entire library with barely three books in English, and those only partially. The rest were Latin and Greek and Arabic, with German and French for supplement. As far as Thomas could tell, Grant’s Latin and Greek was serviceable, his Arabic a lot better than Thomas’s (which was useful, as Thomas was starting from scratch there) but his German was limited and strictly technical.

“I can work through it,” Grant had said, “but you’ll be faster. Division of labour, and all that.”

“I thought a lot of scientific literature was in German, back in the thirties.”

“More of it was. But I was more interested in the science than the language, and I had colleagues who were a lot more fluent than I was. I’m fine in about three very specific areas.”

“Magic, science, and…?” Thomas guessed.

“Physics, magic, and a bunch of more pragmatic phrases.”

“Where are the toilets, that sort of thing?” Thomas had spent six months travelling in Europe, after university, and he’d picked up a reasonable smattering of the language nearly everywhere they’d gone – languages were the only thing that had really held his attention at school aside from rugby, it was why he’d read modern languages at Cambridge, because you had to have a degree and anything else would have been a real slog. He knew which phrases you picked up first, when you were somewhere knew.

“Um,” said Grant. “More like ‘keep your hands where I can see them’, ‘you are prisoners of war’, and ‘what is your name and rank’. The only time I went to Germany it was for fairly specific reasons.”

“Oh,” said Thomas. “Right.” He scrambled for something to say. “Uh…you’ve never been back?”

“Haven’t really left the country since I got shipped back on a stretcher.” Grant shrugged. “Not like there was anybody else to take care of things, if I was on holiday. And I’m not sure how happy they’d be to see me, to be honest.”

Thomas considered the little he knew about Ettersberg, whatever it was that had happened there, and that anecdote Grant had dropped about the Tiger tanks, and the fact that even as poorly trained as he was, he was considered permanently armed, what with the fireball spell. If he was the equivalent of an officer with a gun, Grant was – he remembered that abortive, terrifying confrontation with the Faceless Man. Grant was a walking weapon. It probably made going on holiday a little more complicated.

“Well, who knows,” he said. “Maybe when Abigail and I are a bit more trained you _can_ take a holiday.”

Grant smiled, and shook his head. “Don’t even know what I’d do with myself.”

“Lie on the beach and read a terrible book?” suggested Thomas. “I hear it’s traditional.”

“Well, maybe,” said Grant, and Thomas remembered how twitchy he got after even a few days of inactivity – he’d been a _nightmare_ after he got shot, not while he was seriously ill but when he was recovered enough to be annoyed he was still in the wheelchair. Maybe not lying on the beach, then. (Especially as that invited the mental image of Grant in a swimsuit, which was – um. Probably best avoided for his own sanity.)  

Thomas realised he was about to be late for lunch with his sister, and made his excuses; Grant waved him off amiably, already wrestling with another email on his phone.

Sarah was Thomas’ next-oldest sibling and probably his favourite of all of them. Certainly she was the one he’d seen the most of, when they were kids. She was a corporate lawyer in the City, and by strict proximity Thomas should see her more than he did, but her schedule was even more frantic than his and she had a lot more working lunches.

He met her at a Japanese restaurant on New Row. Thomas had become very familiar with all the restaurants in close proximity to the Folly, since moving there. Molly’s cooking reminded him very much of school, only even more prototypically English than school dinners had been. Grant said he’d tried to encourage her to branch out, but she was happier sticking with what she knew.

“And I’m pretty sure there was about a month there where she was doing a scientific study on capsaicin toxicity in revenge for me giving her the Indian cookbook,” he’d added, “so we compromised. She doesn’t get too snippy when I go out to eat and I let her stick to her strengths.”

Thomas thought Molly might have just been bored, the month in question; he’d observed that Grant had a truly hair-raising tolerance for spiciness in his food, and Abigail wasn’t far behind. It was a little bit of a relief to eat with Sarah and not feel like he had to have the wasabi, just trying to fit in.

They talked a little about Sarah’s job, and the fact that their oldest brother’s wife was pregnant, and then the conversation came around to Thomas’s work. It had been a point of contention with his parents. He still wasn’t sure what Sarah thought of him joining the police, not really.

“So you’re still with the…Economic and Specialist crime unit?” she asked.

“They changed the name again,” Thomas told her with a wave of his chopsticks. “We’re the Special Assessments Unit now. But yes, still the same place.”

“It’s a very small unit, mum and dad said?”

“Just me and DCI Grant, until about six months ago. And we just had a new DC transfer in, Abigail Kamara.”

“I remember some other names, though – Toby? And Molly?”

“Toby’s the dog,” said Thomas. “And Molly’s our, um, station manager. It’s a big nick, there used to be a lot more people in the unit.”

“Nick,” said Sarah, and smiled. “It still seems strange hearing you say that sort of thing. And – there’s a dog?”

“Long story,” Thomas said quickly. “He’s, um, Inspector Grant’s dog. Sort of.”

It had been Grant’s idea to use the dog to try and track William Skirmish’s murderer, and Grant had been quite happy to take responsibility for it, but then Thomas had ended up walking him when Grant was in hospital last summer and if forced to admit it he was actually quite fond of the little mongrel. But admitting to sort of co-owning a dog with his governor was going to make Sarah look at him even more strangely than the admission that they had a dog at their nick. So he didn’t.

“Not much room for upward movement, then,” Sarah said thoughtfully. She’d always had a very clear sense of upward direction, Sarah had. “Although I suppose you can always transfer.”

“Er,” said Thomas. “Maybe. I…like it where I am.”

“But what are you even _doing_?” Sarah asked. “Special Assessment unit. It’s all very vague. It’s not undercover work or something, is it?”

“Ah – no.” Although that option was still on the table, for Skygarden. Abigail had expressed voluble scepticism about Thomas’ ability to fit in on a council estate, but Grant would do just as poorly. When he’d grown up, council estates hadn’t existed. “It’s…pretty obscure stuff. We work with Arts and Antiques a lot.”  

“At least if you were investigating murders it might be _interesting_.”

“That too, sometimes. We work with the Murder Team out of Belgravia nick. It’s a mixed bag.”

“They work you hard, too. Christmas Day and everything!”

“Couldn’t be helped,” said Thomas, who had been more grateful than he hoped Grant ever realised to escape early from another round of questions about what he was doing exactly and whether he was still sure he wanted to be in the police and had he at least found a nice boyfriend. With a side of probing about how _unusual_ his colleagues were. When he’d been in hospital the week before, his parents had managed to arrive at the same time as not only Grant and Abigail, both briskly concerned, but Abdul dropping by to check on him and Ty showing up to give him some more grief about needing her to rescue him. At least she’d managed to charm his parents, and that had only partially been magic. They’d been thinly uncomfortable with Grant, not sure what to make of him, his old-fashioned courtesy and his well-cut suit combined with his race. Thomas had seen Grant’s veiled amusement and wished it wasn’t so justified. At Christmas his mother had asked if it was really _safe_ to be friends with Abdul, because converts were so _militant_ , weren’t they, and Thomas had had to count to ten and swallow his words.

At least they’d missed Alex and Miriam. Alex would have been as northern as possible, just on principle.

“I do like it,” he went on. “It’s never boring, and we do really important things…”

“Yes, yes.” She waved a hand. “You told me that already. Is it making you _happy_ , that’s what I want to know. Everybody in this family does what they’re expected to do and it makes half of us miserable, and you ran off to be a policeman and given how much guff you’ve taken over it – I just want to know it’s working out. I can never tell with you – are you happy?”

Thomas tried to think the question over – Sarah would just give him the third degree if she thought he was brushing her off – but the answer came instantly. “Yes, of course.”

“So what is it that makes you happy, about this whole…specialist crime thing?”

Thomas thought about it, this time; about sitting in a jazz bar with the goddess of the river Tyburn; about Grant haring off on one of his long explanations, and nudging him back to the point, and the first time he’d realised Grant didn’t mind it, maybe expected him to; about Molly’s sharp-toothed smile, when she played with Toby; about the feeling of magic, the power following the path in his mind.

“Oh,” he said. “You know. Nothing in particular. Keeps me occupied.”

“You’re very strange, sometimes, Thomas,” said Sarah.

“Yes,” said Thomas. “So I’ve been told.”

*

“Don’t you have underlings for this sort of thing now?” said Lesley. She’d come to the Folly for late afternoon tea and liaising – the kind that involved lots of paperwork. “Underlings _plural_ , that is, since you absconded with Abigail.”

“I do indeed,” I said. “But they’re not DCIs and neither of them has turned out to be much good at computer hacking, to my great regret. Especially Thomas. I’m not sure he _deserves_ having been born in the twenty-first century.”

“Twentieth,” said Lesley, picking up a gingernut from the plate Molly had left for us.

“You know what I mean.” I went back and forwards, with Thomas. Some days he just took me back to before the war, when I’d been not that much older than he was now; other times I couldn’t believe how young he was. It was easier with Abigail – I’d known her since she was a toddler. Well, I’m not sure it was easier on _her_ , but she’d had every chance to not sign on. “Anyway, thanks, I mean it. I don’t even know how you got your hands on these. I assume they would have got circulated to me eventually, but…”

“You don’t want to know how,” Lesley said. “And they would have – eventually. You need to be better at politics, Peter, then you wouldn’t have to run around like this.”

“I’m as good as I’m allowed to be,” I said, and we shared a tight smile. Lesley understood, of course – she’d slogged her way up the ranks through the eighties and nineties. Different problem, similar results. The result in this case being that some of the reports on the discovery of explosives in Skygarden Tower – the top-level stuff, which _should_ have gotten to me, since it was almost entirely the Folly’s case – had taken the slow route. The trouble with someone wiring a whole tower block of a council estate to explode was that plenty of people didn’t _want_ to believe it was to do with magic.

Given everything, I didn’t really care what sort of theories the counter-terrorism people came up with – they were all wrong – but I did need them to not get in the way of my investigation, and that meant knowing what they were telling each other. Enter Lesley.

Who was staring at the gingernut she was holding with a frown on her face.

“They’re perfectly edible,” I said, waving my own at her. "Don't let Molly catch you looking at them that way." 

“How come _you_ never do the whole no-obligation thing?” she asked.

“Because I have no intention of placing you under one? It’s mostly a formality, especially with you. You’re not a wizard or anything.”

It was a _bit_ more complicated than that, but by and large it was a reasonable rule of thumb. Lesley was about as magical as your average brick – which of course meant she’d probably absorbed quite a lot by sheer exposure, but that wasn’t intrinsic.

 “Huh.” She dunked it in her tea all the same; really, if there was any danger of me placing Lesley under magical obligation by offering her food she was about twenty years too late to worry about it. “I just wondered. Beverley did, was all.”

“Beverley _is_ a bona fide goddess. Wait – when were you getting food from Beverley?”

 “When I ate at her house.” Lesley gave me a look that said I was being dense.

“What, she had you over for dinner? I didn’t realise you two had made friends.”

“Breakfast,” said Lesley, and ate her biscuit.

I contemplated the possible ramifications of this, and decided not to take the bait. I’d get it out of one of them sooner or later. Lesley’s forehead creased slightly, which meant it had _been_ bait.

“Sounds nice,” I said instead. “I’m glad you’ve reversed your policy on the believability of river deities, then.”

“I can’t disbelieve in someone who’s right in front of me. I’m not making any decisions on the _deity_ bit.” The topic was then decisively changed. “I’ve been meaning to ask – how’s it working out, now you’ve got the two of them? I note you’ve actually _solved_ a couple of cases, which is a glorious improvement.”

“Entertainingly,” I said. _They_ were both out of the Folly right now, making it a safe observation. “Teaching people is bringing up all sorts of things I’d forgotten, or lost track of. I think I missed it, after all.”

“Did you teach before the war?” Lesley raised an eyebrow. “You never mentioned that before.”

“Here and there.” Dominic was the only one who was still alive, and he’d never picked up magic again after Ettersberg – just hidden in Herefordshire, all these years. It hadn’t been the sort of legacy I’d wanted to expound on to prospective apprentices, i.e. Lesley, all those years ago.  “Not full-time, and it was mostly more advanced students. Thomas and Abigail are making me remember all the basics. Although at the rate Thomas is going, we’re going to be past those sooner than I expected. And they’ve both got a bit of a competitive streak…but with Thomas, he just really is that good. I didn’t expect that.”

 “You’ve said that a few times, that he’s good at magic. Is it that noticeable?”

“He’s extraordinary,” I said. “And you’re never to tell him I said that.”

“Course not,” Lesley reassured me. “Can’t have our subordinates getting above themselves. Hard enough getting them to pay attention as it is.” She paused. “Extraordinary. Really?”

I shrugged. “I’d say it’s just that I’ve forgotten what it looks like, people learning, but he’s quicker than Abigail, no question. Then again, he’s dreadfully incurious and has no sense of self-preservation whatsoever. But…I could have done a lot worse, for an apprentice.”

“Has it ever occurred to you that it was sort of convenient?” Lesley asked suddenly. “Him turning up like that, when you’d been trying to get an apprentice for however long and not making it stick?”

“No,” I said. “It was coincidence, not convenience. Besides – I know what you’re thinking. Our Faceless Man’s definitely out of Oxford. Thomas went to Cambridge. It’s not impossible that there’s a connection.” There _was_ – he’d told me so himself. But that it went any further, I didn’t believe. 

“But if he’s that good….”

I was already shaking my head. “He learned magic from me, not anybody else. I’ve told you about the _signare_ – I’d know, if he’d been trained before.”

“Could it be faked?”

“Do you ever consider just taking my word on these things? I am sort of the definition of _expert_.”

“Someone’s got to keep you thinking,” Lesley said unrepentantly. “It’s just that I don’t believe in luck. Before you ask, I already floated this past Beverley and she looked at me like I was bonkers, said something about what you two smell like. But she might be wrong, too.”

“You don’t believe in luck?” I asked. “I do. Not in being _lucky_. It’s all a crapshoot, and the dice have no memory. Sometimes things go wrong. A lot of the time.” Glance down at the wrong second; die in a car crash. Take the wrong step forward; get a German bullet through your temple. Give your dog the wrong name; have a revenant-riddled stranger smash your head off. “Sometimes things go right. And it’s not planned, or predictable. It’s serendipity. The only thing to do is be grateful for it, when it comes.”

“You think Tom was serendipitous.”

“I think Thomas is…” I said. “Sure. That’s as good a word as any.”

 “Why _do_ you insist on calling him Thomas?”

“It’s his name.”

“Nobody else calls him that.”

“His family do,” I said. “Most of his friends do – the ones who aren’t police.”

“You’re neither, _and_ police.”

“No – but when he started working for me I asked him what he liked better, and Thomas was what he said. So Thomas it is.”

Lesley frowned. “How come he never said, then?”

I shrugged. “He doesn’t like making a fuss.”

“Bit observant for you, spotting it.”

“Credit me with _some_ ability to read people, Lesley,” I said. “I’ve had enough practice at it.”

“You really like him, don’t you.”

“No,” I said. “Of course not. Can’t understand why you’d think that.”

“Good thing really,” she said. “Considering how long you’re stuck with him, if this whole apprenticeship thing really takes a decade or so.”

“I don’t consider it being stuck.”

Not in the slightest. I’d been fighting a rearguard action, I was coming to realise, maybe ever since Ettersberg. Trying just to keep the Folly around, to hold the balance between the demi-monde and the rest of London, to not be re-organised out of existence. The ruins of what we’d been weren’t enough, but I’d never gotten the leverage to re-build. Since Thomas had sworn the oath…I’d known what my job was for seventy years, but there’d been so many things I couldn’t risk. There’d been nobody to rely on, if I got it wrong. Now I had Thomas, and Abigail too, and the world was opening up again. Not what I thought I’d wanted, or not the way I thought I’d wanted an apprentice; but even with all the chaos of this Faceless Man, whatever he wanted, I was starting to think there was nothing we couldn’t handle, given time.

Sometimes you don’t know you’re alone until you’re not anymore.

“I know you don’t,” said Lesley. “Just try to leave me one or two constables, will you?”

“On my power,” I said. “No more of your constables – unless they come to me first. And, no offence intended, none of them are the right sort. They want things to be _normal_.”

She gave me a sideways look, but she laughed. “Yeah, they’ve got their heads on straight.”

“There you go. I want anybody else, I’ll have to go looking elsewhere.”

Lesley raised her teacup. “To you finding the people you need then, then, anywhere that’s not my nick.”

“Agreed.” I lifted mine in a return salute. “The people I need.”

**Works inspired by this one:**

  * [The Better Person](https://archiveofourown.org/works/4094776) by [Sixthlight](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Sixthlight/pseuds/Sixthlight)




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